While it was roughly 2 years from Maxwell 2 to Pascal, the journey to Turing has felt much longer despite a similar 2 year gap. There’s some truth to the feeling: looking at the past couple years, there’s been basically every other possible development in the GPU space except next-generation gaming video cards, like Intel’s planned return to discrete graphics, NVIDIA’s Volta, and cryptomining-specific cards. Finally, at Gamescom 2018, NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 20 series, built on TSMC’s 12nm “FFN” process and powered by the Turing GPU architecture. Launching today with full general availability is just the GeForce RTX 2080, as the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti was delayed a week to the 27th, while the GeForce RTX 2070 is due in October. So up for review today is the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and GeForce RTX 2080.

But a standard new generation of gaming GPUs this is not. The “GeForce RTX” brand, ousting the long-lived “GeForce GTX” moniker in favor of their announced “RTX technology” for real time ray tracing, aptly underlines NVIDIA’s new vision for the video card future. Like we saw last Friday, Turing and the GeForce RTX 20 series are designed around a set of specialized low-level hardware features and an intertwined ecosystem of supporting software currently in development. The central goal is a long-held dream of computer graphics researchers and engineers alike – real time ray tracing – and NVIDIA is aiming to bring that to gamers with their new cards, and willing to break some traditions on the way.

NVIDIA GeForce Specification Comparison

RTX 2080 Ti

RTX 2080

RTX 2070

GTX 1080

CUDA Cores

4352

2944

2304

2560

Core Clock

1350MHz

1515MHz

1410MHz

1607MHz

Boost Clock

1545MHz
FE: 1635MHz

1710MHz
FE: 1800MHz

1620MHz
FE: 1710MHz

1733MHz

Memory Clock

14Gbps GDDR6

14Gbps GDDR6

14Gbps GDDR6

10Gbps GDDR5X

Memory Bus Width

352-bit

256-bit

256-bit

256-bit

VRAM

11GB

8GB

8GB

8GB

Single Precision Perf.

13.4 TFLOPs

10.1 TFLOPs

7.5 TFLOPs

8.9 TFLOPs

Tensor Perf. (INT4)

430TOPs

322TOPs

238TOPs

N/A

Ray Perf.

10 GRays/s

8 GRays/s

6 GRays/s

N/A

"RTX-OPS"

78T

60T

45T

N/A

TDP

250W
FE: 260W

215W
FE: 225W

175W
FE: 185W

180W

GPU

TU102

TU104

TU106

GP104

Transistor Count

18.6B

13.6B

10.8B

7.2B

Architecture

Turing

Turing

Turing

Pascal

Manufacturing Process

TSMC 12nm "FFN"

TSMC 12nm "FFN"

TSMC 12nm "FFN"

TSMC 16nm

Launch Date

09/27/2018

09/20/2018

10/2018

05/27/2016

Launch Price

MSRP: $999
Founders $1199

MSRP: $699
Founders $799

MSRP: $499
Founders $599

MSRP: $599
Founders $699

As we discussed at the announcement, one of the major breaks is that NVIDIA is introducing GeForce RTX as the full upper tier stack with x80 Ti/x80/x70 stack, where it has previously tended towards the x80/x70 products first, and the x80 Ti as a mid-cycle refresh or competitive response. More intriguingly, each GeForce card has their own distinct GPU (TU102, TU104, and TU106), with direct Quadro and now Tesla variants of TU102 and TU104. While we covered the Turing architecture in the preceding article, the takeaway is that each chip is proportionally cut-down, including the specialized RT Cores and Tensor Cores; with clockspeeds roughly the same as Pascal, architectural changes and efficiency enhancements will be largely responsible for performance gains, along with the greater bandwidth of 14Gbps GDDR6.

And as far as we know, Turing technically did not trickle down from a bigger compute chip a la GP100, though at the architectural level it is strikingly similar to Volta/GV100. Die size brings more color to the story, because with TU106 at 454mm2, the smallest of the bunch is frankly humungous for a FinFET die nominally dedicated for a x70 GeForce product, and comparable in size to the 471mm2 GP102 inside the GTX 1080 Ti and Pascal Titans. Even excluding the cost and size of enabled RT Cores and Tensor Cores, a slab of FinFET silicon that large is unlikely to be packaged and priced like the popular $330 GTX 970 and still provide the margins NVIDIA is pursuing.

These observations are not so much to be pedantic, but more so to sketch out GeForce Turing’s positioning in relation to Pascal. Having separate GPUs for each model is the most expensive approach in terms of research and development, testing, validation, extra needed fab tooling/capacity – the list goes on. And it raises interesting questions on the matter of binning, yields, and salvage parts. Though NVIDIA certainly has the spare funds to go this route, there’s surely a better explanation than Turing being primarily designed for a premium-priced consumer product that cannot command the margins of professional parts. These all point to the known Turing GPUs as oriented for lower-volume, and NVIDIA’s financial quarterly reports indicate that GeForce product volume is a significant factor, not just ASP.

And on that note, the ‘reference’ Founders Edition models are no longer reference; the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070 Founders Editions feature 90MHz factory overclocks and 10W higher TDP, and NVIDIA does not plan to productize a reference card themselves. But arguably the biggest change is the move from blower-style coolers with a radial fan to an open air cooler with dual axial fans. The switch in design improves cooling capacity and lowers noise, but with the drawback that the card can no longer guarantee that it can cool itself. Because the open air design re-circulates the hot air back into the chassis, it is ultimately up to the chassis to properly exhaust the heat. In contrast, a blower pushes all the hot air through the back of the card and directly out of the case, regardless of the chassis airflow or case fans.

All-in-all, NVIDIA is keeping the Founders Edition premium, which is now $200 over the baseline ‘reference.’ Though AIB partner cards are also launching today, in practice the Founders Edition pricing is effectively the retail price until the launch rush has subsided.

The GeForce RTX 20 Series Competition: The GeForce GTX 10 Series

In the end, the preceding GeForce GTX 10 series ended up occupying an odd spot in the competitive landscape. After its arrival in mid-2016, only the lower end of the stack had direct competition, due to AMD’s solely mainstream/entry Polaris-based Radeon RX 400 series. AMD’s RX 500 series refresh in April 2017 didn’t fundamentally change that, and it was only until August 2017 that the higher-end Pascal parts had direct competition with their generational equal in RX Vega. But by that time, the GTX 1080 Ti (not to mention the Pascal Titans) was unchallenged. And all the while, an Ethereum-led resurgence of mining cryptocurrency on video cards was wreaking havoc on GPU pricing and inventory, first on Polaris products, then general mainstream parts, and finally affecting any and all GPUs.

Not that NVIDIA sat on their laurels with Vega, releasing the GTX 1070 Ti anyhow. But what was constant was how the pricing models evolved with the Founders Editions schema, the $1200 Titan X (Pascal), and then $700 GTX 1080 Ti and $1200 Titan Xp. Even the $3000 Titan V maintained gaming cred despite diverging greatly from previous Titan cards as firmly on the professional side of prosumer, basically allowing the product to capture both prosumers and price-no-object enthusiasts. Ultimately, these instances coincided with the rampant cryptomining price inflation and was mostly subsumed by it.

So the higher end of gaming video cards has been Pascal competing with itself and moving up the price brackets. For Turing, the GTX 1080 Ti has become the closest competitor. RX Vega performance hasn’t fundamentally changed, and the fallout appears to have snuffed out any Vega 10 parts, as well as Vega 14nm+ (i.e. 12nm) refreshes. As a competitive response, AMD doesn’t have many cards up their sleeves except the ones already played – game bundles (such as the current “Raise the Game” promotion), FreeSync/FreeSync 2, other hardware (CPU, APU, motherboard) bundles. Other than that, there’s a DXR driver in the works and a machine learning 7nm Vega on the horizon, but not much else is known, such as mobile discrete Vega. For AMD graphics cards on shelves right now, RX Vega is still hampered by high prices and low inventory/selection, remnants of cryptomining.

For the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and 2080, NVIDIA would like to sell you the RTX cards as your next upgrade regardless of what card you may have now, essentially because no other card can do what Turing’s features enable: real time raytracing effects ((and applied deep learning) in games. And because real time ray tracing offers graphical realism beyond what rasterization can muster, it’s not comparable to an older but still performant card. Unfortunately, none of those games have support for Turing’s features today, and may not for some time. Of course, NVIDIA maintains that the cards will provide expected top-tier performance in traditional gaming. Either way, while Founders Editions are fixed at their premium MSRP, custom cards are unsurprisingly listed at those same Founders Edition price points or higher.

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337 Comments

Way too expensive. If those cards were the same price as the 1080 / TI it would be a generation change.

This actually is a regression, the price has increased out of every proportion even if you completely were to ignore that newer generations are EXPECTED to be a lot faster than the older ones for essentially the same price (plus a bit of inflation max).

paying 50% more for a 30% increase is a simple ripoff. no one should buy these cards ... sadly a lot of people will let themselves get ripped off once more by nvidia.

and no: raytracing is not an argument here, this feature is not supported anywhere and by the time it will be adopted (if ever) years will have gone bye and these cards will be old and obsolete. all of this is just marketing and hot air.Reply

There are those who claim buying RTX to get the new features is sensible for future proofing; I don't understand why they ignore that the performance of said features on these cards is so poor. NVIDIA spent years pushing gamers into high frequency monitors, 4K and VR, now they're trying to flip everyone round the other way, pretend that sub-60Hz 1080p is ok.

And btw, it's a lot more than 50%. Where I am (UK) the 2080 Ti is almost 100% more than the 1080 Ti launch price. It's also crazy that the 2080 Ti does not have more RAM, it should have had at least 16GB. My guess is NVIDIA knows that by pushing gamers back down to lower resolutions, they don't need so much VRAM. People though have gotten used to the newer display tech, and those who've adopted high refresh displays physically cannot go back.Reply

Why the tame conclusion? Do us a favor will u? Just come out and say you'd have to be mental to pay these prices for features that aren't even available yet and you'd be better off buying previous gen video cards that are currently heavily discounted. Reply